Dinaw Mengestu Quotes

I'm writing a book and working on my one-woman show, Learning To Be Human.

I wasn't one of those kids who grew up wanting to write or who read a particular book and thought: 'I want to do that!' I always told stories and wrote them down, but I never thought writing was a career path, even though, clearly, someone was writing the books and newspapers and magazines.

In each of my characters there is a little of me. Not strictly autobiographical but a little piece of my soul.

People go to college to find who they are as a person and find what they want to do in life, and I kind of already know that so it would be like I'd be taking a step back or something.

Writing is far too hard work to say what someone else wants me to. Serving it as a craft, using it as a way of growing in my own understanding, seems to me to be a beautiful way to live. And if that product is shareable with other people, so much the better.

I knew from the age of 16 that I wanted to be a writer because I just didn't think I could do anything else. So I read and read and wrote short stories and dreamed of escape.

I was always told you're not going to make much money from writing. You can actually do it. Now I've built a really good, big house out of words.

My theory is that I decided to be a writer when I was about seven, but of course it is not as simple as that. Like most writers, I had to work at other things to earn a living and wrote mainly in the evenings, often very late at night, for many years.

By the time I was 23 or 24 and had written the first manuscript of 'The Final Winter', I knew I wanted to make it a career but didn't know how. It took me a long time to grow into myself, but when my love of writing returned, it did so with an enormous amount of venom. It is now a mainstay in my life.

I lived to write, and wrote to live.

I write the books to amuse myself.

I went on a kibbutz for two years. I then realized I have to study. I have to learn something.

I'm not really interested in myself in my writing. I can't see myself in the songs, even though I know different parts of me are there.

I was in law school at the University of Kentucky and realized I didn't really like law school, so I took a creative writing course for something different.

The whole point of college is to find yourself, to figure out things before you go into the real world.

Both of my parents were journalists, and my rebellion, such as it was, was to become a fiction writer.

Until I figure out what I'm going to do when I grow up, I'm not going to be grown up.

I suppose I have written novels to find out what I thought about something and poems to find out what I felt about something.

I think I didn't know what I was creating, as much as I knew what I didn't want to do. And I didn't want my mother's life. She was an unhappy, frustrated artist who always dreamed of a life that was never going to be hers.

It was really a focus on how to in some ways keep moving in this direction towards something that allowed me to express myself in a way that sports didn't.

I went to college to study drama where I discovered I had no talent and after a period of dropping out majored in cultural anthropology which of course meant more masks and dancing. I studied what interested me and so I had to become a writer because my education had left me unsuited for a decent well-paying job.

Any writer worth his salt writes to please himself...It's a self-exploratory operation that is endless. An exorcism of not necessarily his demon, but of his divine discontent.

I didn't write because I had anything to say, but in order to find out what there was to say.

Writing is the act of discovery.

Each artist comes to the painting or sculpture because there he can be told that he, the individual, transcends all classes and flouts all predictions. In the work of art, he finds his uniqueness confirmed.